We want to give developers a heads-up about an upcoming change affecting AdWords reports. If you retrieve reports via the AdWords API's getReportDownloadUrl() or getGzipReportDownloadUrl() method then these changes may potentially affect the data in your reports. These changes impact a small number of columns and should not fundamentally change the way you parse report data.
We plan on rolling out these changes on Tuesday, August 19.
The values returned by the following columns will be changing. Please note that some of these columns are only available for reports scheduled via the AdWords web interface, not the AdWords API, but we're listing them here in case you use the AdWords API to retrieve and process such reports.
- CustomerTimeZone: the time zone information will be returned as, e.g., the previous "America/New_York" will change to "(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time".
- Time aggregation columns: the columns representing the aggregation time period (e.g. weekStart) will represent date ranges in a different format. E.g. the previous "2008-06-01-2008-06-01" will now be returned as "6/1/08 - 6/1/08".
- Keyword: values for category-based website criteria will change from, e.g., "docvertical::3" to "Animals >> Endangered Species". Values returned for keyword or non-category-based website criteria should not change.
- Interactions: the name of reported interactions will change from, e.g., "VideoPlayTime25" to "Video Play Reached 25%."
There are also fixes to edge cases in which values for the impressions and the position preferences columns that were previously returned as invalid values should be more accurate.
If you would like to test your application against these changes ahead of time, please visit the AdWords web interface and log in as an account in which you normally would run reports. Visit the "Reports" or "Client Reports" tab, select an existing report from the list, and when viewing the report, use the "Export Report" button to download the report as a .xml file. This XML should match the report XML that you will retrieve via the AdWords API after the changes are put in place.
